Charles C.W. Cooke thinks that Political Opportunists Make This a Silly Season to Remember.
I, for one, see solid arguments for forgetting it ASAP. But here's Charlie:
Christmas approaches, and with it the silly season in our national politics. At the best of times, the end of the year inaugurates a lull. In an interregnum, that lull becomes a crash. The old president is impotent, the new president is embryonic, Congress is inert, and the press has one eye on the mistletoe. Into this void emerge the cynics and the snake-oil merchants, the dreamers, the circumventers, the guileful peddlers of One Weird Tricks. “If” becomes the mot du jour. “Only,” too. If he, she, they, whoever would only act, sign, impose, declare, then wondrous changes would be afoot. And when better to achieve such reforms than now, when the system is in anticipated flux? “The Constitution,” said Washington in his farewell address, “is sacredly obligatory upon all.” The Hell it is, rejoin the opportunists: Do it — and be legends.
In New York, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has offered up her own contribution to this cycle by attempting to persuade President Joe Biden that he can amend the Constitution on his own. Per the New York Times, Gillibrand’s “mission” is to “convince” Biden that he can “rescue his legacy” by “adding the century-old Equal Rights Amendment . . . to the Constitution.” If that sounds a touch peculiar, worry not your weary head, for, in Gillibrand’s telling, Biden could achieve the outcome with nothing more convoluted than “one phone call.” That this is transparent and embarrassing nonsense — and that it was rejected as such by no less a figure than Ruth Bader Ginsburg — is beside the point. The aim, as so often, is to pretend that the salutary inertia that characterizes so much of American politics is the inevitable product not of our finely tuned Constitution, but of the inexplicable cowardice of those who wield its powers. In reality, the push to codify the Equal Rights Amendment ended more than 40 years ago, when the states’ ratification deadline expired. Its advocates knew this, its antagonists knew this, neutral observers knew this — everyone knew this. At one level, one suspects that Senator Gillibrand knows this, too, but that she also knows how politically efficacious it can be to provide explanations to the public that, as H. L. Mencken had it, are neat, plausible, and wrong.
Other Constitution-trashers named and shamed by CCWC: Bill Kristol, Steve Bannon. (And, as noted yesterday, we in New Hampshire can add our CongressCritters Chris Pappas and Annie Kuster to the naughty list.)
Also of note:
-
Because there's a little Madame Defarge in all of us? I don't think Becket Adams (writing in the Hill) ever gets around to delivering the answer his column's headline promises: Why they're so eager to make excuses for murder. He does detail the mealy-mouthedness of figures like Elizabeth Warren and AOC who seemingly can't simply say "Murder is wrong" without having their next word be "but".
Becket poses the interesting hypothetical:
As a quick exercise, let’s imagine that Mangione had murdered an abortion doctor, provoking days of celebration on right-wing social media. What would the reaction from polite society be if, for instance, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) were to rationalize this celebration as a natural response from people who sincerely believe that abortion is murder?
How do you think the press would react? It would be shock and disgusted, and rightly so. But there is no widespread shock in the media over the remarks made by Ocasio-Cortez and Warren. We see no great outcry over their rationalizations. This is because deranged left-wingers enjoy representation in the news media, unlike deranged right-wingers.
Hey, remember when Bill Clinton had his Sister Souljah moment? It would be nice if more Democrats had those.
-
Oh, the humanity! An AP story is headlined: Journalists anticipate a renewed hostility toward their work under the incoming Trump administration. At Power Line, John Hinderaker says: Pity the Poor Reporters. It's kind of a classic fisking, with excerpts from the AP interspersed with John's comments.
Skipping down to the end:
Finally, the AP takes a sympathetic view of ProPublica’s attempt to smear Pete Hegseth:
Pete Hegseth also used social media to say that ProPublica — he called it a “Left Wing hack group” — …
ProPublica is a left-wing hack group, although the AP describes its editor in chief as the “prominent editor” of a “nonprofit news outlet,” and quotes him positively in another context.
…was about to knowingly publish a false report that he hadn’t been accepted into West Point decades ago. The news site had contacted him after officials at the military academy contradicted Hegseth’s claim of acceptance. Hegseth provided proof that those officials were mistaken, and ProPublica never published a story.
The AP sees no problem with ProPublica’s collaborating with someone at the USMA who was trying to smear Hegseth to help block his nomination as Secretary of Defense. It was only because Hegseth happened to keep his acceptance letter from West Point, and, I take it, was able to produce the letter within the one hour allotted by ProPublica, that the lie did not go forward.
“That’s journalism,” noted ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger. But a narrative had taken hold: “ProPublica’s botched Pete Hegseth smear,” the New York Post called it in a headline.
That’s journalism? Well, yes, that’s journalism in the eyes of the Associated Press and the rest of the liberal media. I have seen no reason to believe that any significant number of journalists have looked in the mirror and honestly tried to assess why most Americans now view them with contempt. Let me spell it out: the liberal press is dishonest. It is a tool of the Democratic Party and the left. It lies and misleads, constantly, about Republicans and conservatives, while consistently covering up stories that reflect badly on Democrats and liberals.
Until journalists start correcting their misbehavior, they are going to continue to feel nervous. Because, as the AP says, quoting the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, “our most important audiences are the courts and the public.”
I, for one, am pretty disgusted with the New York Times, which doesn't have a single book by Amor Towles on its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
But a slight redemption: in their accompanying Readers Pick article, A Gentleman in Moscow weighs in at #3, and The Lincoln Highway is at #75.
-
Spoiler: Die Hard doesn't make the cut. James Lileks asks, and answers: What, exactly, is a "Christmas Movie"?
I am not rigid about what is and is not a Christmas movie, if you’re wondering. Hallmark movies fit the definition, even though they’re just Harlequin paperbacks with sleigh-bell soundtracks. Sample plot:
A busy career woman learns the true meaning of Christmas when she falls under the spell of a darkly charismatic European, only to realize that its her working-class man, who literally would walk barefoot across broken glass for her, is her true love, and -
No, wait, that’s Die Hard. More like this:
Kendee Kermle is a busy New York businesswoman who runs her own candy caramel company, called Better than Sects, a reference to her troubled history escaping a religious cult. She thinks she is in love with her fiancé Harcourt X. Groyne, a man who imports Campari to the US then exports it right back, because it’s awful. A few days before Christmas she gets a cryptic message from a high school sweetheart Truman Paynter in her home town of Kincaid: it says only “do you remember when.” She realizes that she does not, in fact, remember when, and must go home to learn the mysteries of her past. She runs out on her fiance and drives to Kincade through a picturesque snowstorm, and arrives just in time to meet up with Truman, who runs a dog shelter / yoga studio, and they make the candies that will put the charity drive to save the town gazebo over the top. It’s the best Christmas ever!
And there's a great AI-generated pic of James crawling through the Nakatomi Plaza ductwork.
Recently on the book blog: |